


of homes and homecomings

by packrat



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: (for the gays), 6 is from both their perspectives, Abandonment, Abuse, Abusive Parents, Blood, Canon up until 3x05, Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Gen, HAPPY ENDING!!!!, Multi Chapter, Self Harm, Talk of sex, They meet in chapter 6, Violence, and a train journey that doesn’t end in Barcelona, and killing the family, but not really, chapter 4 introduces eve, chapter 5 is meeting the family, eventual hurt/comfort, inspired by 3x05, knobs get chopped off, lots of blood, maybe a bit divergent but, no brothers are harmed in this story, now features unsuccessfully setting a building on fire, partly graphic, slightly canon deviant, soft!villanelle, underage girls that get taken advantage of by their teachers, what home meant to oksana/villanelle over the years, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-12
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:20:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24144274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/packrat/pseuds/packrat
Summary: “of homes and homecomings” is an exploration into what home could mean to oksana/villanelle set at different but significant stages in her life and a (re-)discovery of who oksana/villanelle was, is, and could be. it follows canon for the most part until 3x05.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, villanelle & parents
Comments: 16
Kudos: 95





	1. 1993 - 2001: Russia

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to give a special shout out to all my peers who put up with me and my incoherent thoughts, especially @strangled-by-jodie-comer and @darkrosemind on tumblr (ily two!)

The first memory Oksana Anatoljevna Astankova has of her life was when she was three years old. It had been her birthday. Her mother had baked her a cake and she’d spent the afternoon sitting in her father's lap. His hands felt heavy but safe around her tiny waist, she felt protected, like no one would be able to harm her. It is one of her happier memories. 

And one of her saddest.

“There is something wrong with her. She must have been born backwards,” she hears her mother complain to her father in the evening. They believe their daughter to be asleep, arguing in hushed voices that turn very loud very quickly. Only fractions of sentences reach Oksana’s ears:

“No, there is something wrong with her—”

“There is a darkness that is taking you down with her—”

“Why can’t you see that?”

“NO!” 

Then a slapping sound.

Then silence.

It’s always only her mother’s voice she hears.

Since she can remember, Oksana struggles with understanding and coming to terms with her emotions. Her mind was always in turmoil. Her thoughts cluttered and all over the place. Most of them in her mother’s voice, screaming so loudly that all Oksana can do to make it stop is to hit herself repeatedly in the head. 

The first time she hurt something that was not herself was an accident.

There had been a bird at the windowsill and Oksana managed to catch it with her hands, proud to have caught it. But then it wouldn’t stop moving and flapping its wings and the bird’s panic suddenly was Oksana’s panic and then she squeezed, squeezed, squeezed, just willing to make it stop. All she wanted was for the bird to be calm again. 

That day she learnt about death. 

She stops hurting herself.

For a while it was birds then. 

She couldn’t explain to herself why she had done what she had done and why it felt so indescribably good, like instant relief to an itch she couldn’t scratch. But she loved observing them as she squeezed their fragile bodies, felt the snap of their filigree bones reverberate in her palms, watched the light leave their tiny black eyes. 

The empty look of their eyes is the only one she never needed to learn to copy. 

She wondered if it looked the same with other animals. If it was a universal occurrence. Or if it looked entirely different. 

When she is five years old she finds a dog in the streets and brings it home with her. Her mother is angry beyond measure. Oksana doesn’t understand why. That day she is reminded that her skin bruises easily. 

Like most nights, she spends that one crying. Quietly. With tears so hot they might as well burn her skin. She cries in fear of her mother coming up and continuing her torture and she cries in self hatred. But mostly in fear that her mother will come and see and tell her to stop it because she doesn’t like it. She always tells Oksana to stop whatever she is doing because she doesn’t like it.

Then she gets up and she takes a sharp knife from the kitchen. She watches the dog bleed out with fascination. How the body collapses in on itself and the amounts of red liquid pooling around it. And the light left its eyes just like it would with the birds. That night Oksana learns to switch off her emotions completely. 

When her mother hits her again, and Oksana can’t hit back because it’s her mother after all and she loves her daughter, she must, Oksana calmly turns to the door and goes outside. And then she runs as fast and as far as her five year old legs can carry her. When she returns, she crosses paths with a cat. Orange. Fat. Ugly. Oksana can’t remember what came over her in that moment but she kicked it. And kicked it and kicked it until strong arms tore her away and inside the house. They push her into the living room and onto the sofa. 

That afternoon her father teaches her how to fight. How to get a good punch in without hurting herself and how to defend herself. He’s too strong for her but he lets her punch him as much as she needs. 

She stopped killing animals after that.

By the time Oksana starts school her father had turned into a devout alcoholic, always drunk and her body always the outlet of his love and anger. 

Her mother is screaming at her more and saying bad things about Oksana to her face. Oksana thinks it’s because she’s looking for a reaction from her. 

Oksana is getting good at shutting out people she doesn't care about. But never does she manage that with her parents. She cares about them so deeply, just looking to be loved like a normal child, like her brother, so most things she lets happen to her without defending herself: lets herself be screamed at all hours of the day, lets herself be grabbed forcefully and roughly by her mother, yanked from the living room into the kitchen and from the kitchen into her room, lets herself be handled, sometimes carefully but most times roughly, by her father. 

In the beginning she didn’t understand any of it. Then she started to understand that this was the kind of love she deserved for not being like Pyotr.

Oksana discovers early that she loves school. 

She loves being away from home, from _her_ , and she loves learning. Her mind has always been a bottomless pit always yearning for more to fill the void.

The Bible talks about temptations and eating from the Tree of Knowledge and that’s what Oksana wants to do: to eat the fruit and know. 

She didn’t know what she wanted to know exactly but “knowledge is power,” one of her teachers said to her class on the very first day of school and Oksana learnt early on that power meant everything at home. 

She never made any friends. The thing was that she couldn't care less about them and their shrill and loud laughter, their running in circles that she saw absolutely no point in. She did like though that they all liked her. And that she could _make_ them like her. For her it was simply about learning how to use her body language and eyes and make all of them fall in love with her. 

When she is seven years old, a boy kisses her for the first (and the last) time. Oksana knew from the beginning that she didn’t like boys, she always only had eyes for girls. 

He pulls her into the forest behind the school and presses his sticky hands to her face and his lips on hers and Oksana sees red. She struggles to remember what exactly happened after that, only remembers the orange cat, sitting in the principal's office with a bleeding nose and a bruise turning black on her forehead and the orange cat and her mother. 

And then screaming, screaming, screaming when they’re in the car. Being told she’s worthless and an embarrassment and a fuck up. Oksana tries to not listen but it’s hard when it comes from the people who are supposed to make you feel safe. 

More screaming when she enters the front door with her mother. A hard slap to her cheek. Tears. Her spending three days and nights locked in her room with no food, no water, nothing.

There are memories of her father. They are blurry and all-in-one but she recalls one of them clearly: one day he was there and the next day he was gone. She brushes off the feeling that it was her mother’s doing but deep down she knows. 

Every day her mother reminds her that it’s Oksana’s fault he’s gone. That her darkness is the reason he’s not in their lives anymore. Most days she calls Oksana a monster, or heartless, or an abomination. That she wishes it was her daughter who would’ve gone instead of him and that Oksana does not deserve to eat, to sleep in a bed, to be loved, to be alive.

Somewhere between the first time and the last time she hears it, she starts believing it, too.

She is eight years old when she hits her brother for the first time. He would not stop crying and it’s annoying Oksana who was left to look after him while their mother is out grocery shopping. She punches him hard in the gut, screaming that he should stop crying, that it’s freaking her out but he only cries harder. He wouldn’t stop and Oksana sees the birds again. 

She only stops hitting Pyotr because her mother returns home and starts hitting her instead. 

It’s one month later when her mother wakes her up in the middle of the night. Oksana remembers how she was shivering because it was early February and they could not afford to pay their heating bill that month. 

She is confused and sleepy but she trusts her mother when she is told that they’re going on a secret adventure, just them two. She tries to ignore how uncharacteristically her mother behaves and tries to focus on their adventure ahead. 

When her mother makes her get out of the car and shoves her favorite yellow backpack into Oksana’s tiny arms, the sun is starting to rise and Oksana knows that this is it. That they had arrived and whatever this turns out to be, it’s final. 

The building she looks at is big but run down. Some of the windows aren’t windows anymore, rather just holes in the wall, partly taped with cardboard. The cardboard in itself barely holding together, water soaked from rain and torn from use. The door must have been white at one point earlier in time, most of the paint peeled off by now. 

The smell on the inside is pungent and Oksana feels her insides trying to turn outside. She looks around and the interior looks even more run down than expected from the outside. 

Her mother starts talking to another woman but Oksana turns to look at the paint smeared on the walls, bored by the conversation they are having. 

She only turns back around when she hears the door falling shut. 

And her mother was nowhere near in sight.


	2. 2001 - 2005: The Orphanage

This one begins like it ends: an early morning with the sun barely visible on the horizon, an engine roaring up loudly and driving down the street into the far off distance.

Oksana knows that this sound is her mother’s car and that she was left behind. She stares at the door and listens until the noise is gone. And even then she stands, petrified, unable to process her thoughts. Her legs feel heavy and she breathes deeply as she’s desperately trying not to freak out. 

Oksana doesn’t allow herself to grieve because she is told that her mother will pick her up “in a month or so” and in Oksana’s mind that means the time around her birthday. 

Twenty-three days. 

They will come for her on her birthday. 

They don’t come for her on her birthday. 

Oksana wakes up in a better mood than she would usually that day. Nobody cares that it is her ninth birthday and she doesn’t care that they don’t care. She is excited and tells everyone that today her parents are picking her up again, and that she won’t stay parentless like them forever. She had behaved for every single of the twenty-three days and nights, did not instigate fights, did not hurt others even when they touched her and hurt her, and ate her food even though it was disgusting. She did not even complain when the older children made her sleep on the ground instead of the beds.

Oksana’s bag is packed, everything stuffed in haphazardly and half heartedly. Oksana had always been anything but thoughtful about her belongings. 

By 8 am she waits outside, in front of the building, with more patience than she’s ever mustered in her life. 

They will come, she tells herself. Her mother will have made her a birthday cake and they will all be happy and cheerful when Oksana walks through the door to the kitchen. They will hug her and welcome her home. They will sing and dance and play games and watch TV. They will do family things. Normal things. 

It’s a happy fantasy Oksana hopes will happen one day. 

It’s 10 am.

They don’t come.

By noon she gets asked to join everyone to eat. She ignores them. 

They don’t come. 

It gets dark. 

They don’t come. 

The temperature drops significantly. 

They don’t come. 

It starts raining, slowly first and then all at once. It’s like someone is pouring a bucket of water on her head. 

They won’t come. 

They never intended to come.

Just then, and only then, Oksana allows herself to grieve. 

When a hand lands on her shoulder, she feels hopeful for a second but Oksana knows that her mother would never touch her with such softness. 

There were razor blades where a child should expect tenderness, cutting deep into skin and drawing blood. And Oksana, Oksana always has to tend to her wounds in darkness, alone.

“Come inside,” the superintendent says. The way it’s said does not sting like a harsh palm to soft cheek. It does not hurt like when she brought the dog home, or when she punched the boy, or when she came out of her room and just existed and breathed the same air as her mother.

Oksana nods but doesn’t move otherwise. 

They won’t come.

She wishes her mother would care about her like that but instead she got dumped here like a puppy the day after Christmas, with no goodbyes and empty promises. She got discarded as if she is not her mother’s daughter. As if Oksana is not her flesh and skin and bones, her hair and eyes and mouth and beauty spots and darkness. As if what Oksana is has never been her mother’s fault. As if Oksana is just a thing you can throw in the trash because it’s broken and there is no effort made to try and fix it. 

The hand leaves her shoulder and Oksana flinches. 

“Come.” The voice sounds sterner now but Oksana can hear the pity lacing it even without looking at the woman’s face.

Oksana refuses to unpack the little clothing her mother carefully packed in her favorite backpack. Instead, she opts to sit by the window, wordlessly staring out onto the street, hopeful for her mother’s return. For her father to lift her up and tell her that he’s more than sorry for letting her mother leave her and dumping her in this shithole with all the other kids. 

She winces then, a pitiable sound, as she remembers that her father isn’t anymore. And she realizes that he would’ve never let it get this far in the first place. 

Oksana suppresses a sob and it clings to the inside of her throat like old gum to the underside of a shoe and it almost suffocates her. She does not like the feeling of it at all. 

At the side of her body she balls up her fist. 

_He would have protected you._

Her hands shake and her fingernails leave crescents in her palm. 

_Your mother doesn’t love you._

Her balled fist rises and she eyes her shaking hand with fascination.

_You got thrown away because you are nothing but darkness._

Oksana starts hitting herself in the head repeatedly. She is not sure whether it is because she wants her mother’s voice out of her head and to not think and feel or because she needs to punish herself for not being normal and for being the darkness that hangs over her like a heavy cloud or whether it is because nobody loves her, loved her, will love her. 

She’s an unlovable creature. She should start acting like one.

Oksana stops feeling after day twenty-seven. 

Spring has just arrived in the city and the city, gray and wet and everything poor, is beginning to look just a little bit brighter. 

The air stops smelling entirely used up. It is replaced by something cleaner and fresher that should make it easier to breathe. 

There was something Oksana used to find fascinating about the days getting longer and warmer and brighter.

Oksana feels nothing. 

She feels nothing when the flowers grow and the birds start singing in the morning

She feels nothing. 

She only feels when she eats. 

She begins to hate school. She still loves learning, indulges in learning languages like she’d indulge in food but everything else about her new school sucks. 

By the time she is ten she is actively looking for someone to fight her back. For someone to punch her, to make her bruise and bleed and _feel_. Oksana is ten and she is sick of the emptiness inside of her. 

Oksana knows that her limbs are her limbs but they feel detached from her, everything belonging to different units not controlled by her. She feels like a misprogrammed machine. She feels cold and desolate and numb to the touch of others. 

She doesn’t know, can’t remember when and how it happened, can’t recall when feeling like a person became feeling like nothing more than a thing. 

She will always remember why. 

“Your mother warned us that you are trouble. _Trouble is something that follows her everywhere_ she had said,” the director tells her. It’s the third time that Oksana is in her office, and it is only Monday. 

The director is an older lady with gray hair in a tight bun sitting low in her neck, mean eyes, and a mouth that always frowns. She has no tolerance for children who are acting up yet Oksana manages to charm her way out of trouble every single time.

Oksana rolls her eyes because she _knows_ what her mother said. But at least she is not the voice of her thoughts anymore. She only hears her father telling her to punch harder, “harder Oksana, is that all that you have got?”

“Please stop punching the older boys just to show everyone that you are stronger, yes? I don’t want to see you in here again today.”

She doesn’t hit the older boys because she wants to show how strong she is but she does not tell the director that. 

She sits in her office two more times that day.

The nothingness intensifies at night. It’s sitting heavy like a cinderblock on her chest and breathing gets hard then. She is falling into an abyss of darkness, literally and figuratively, and the only thing she can do to make everything stop is to hurt herself. 

Sometimes she hears her mother, telling her that she is worthless and useless and she remembers that her father isn’t alive anymore and hears her mother tell her that it’s all Oksana’s fault. 

As she gets older she stops punishing herself. 

Feeling nothing becomes feeling like herself more and more until she stops remembering what feeling something feels like.

Nothing much happens until much later and it’s ironic, in retrospect, that it happens when she is twelve. She won’t meet them, the organization, until many years later but she thinks it’s strange how it’s such a significant number in her life because it changed her life drastically. Twice.

It’s the middle of August and for the first time since the day she turned nine, Oksana feels. It is not strong and just an afterthought in the back of her mind but she feels something amidst the swallowing nothingness.

She knows that it’s a bad omen yet she can’t help herself but revel in it.

When she is eating her lunch, secluded from the others, and pretending to read about Jack the Ripper, Oksana is approached by the director of the orphanage. 

A heavy feeling settles in Oksana’s stomach and her fingers grab the sandwich in her left hand tight, and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Her knuckles turn white. 

She knows before the police has a chance to tell her: her family has died in a tragic car accident.

No five minutes after the police leave the building Oksana runs to her room. She screams into a pillow, she punches the bed, she punches a hole into the wall next to the other holes she had punched in the past. Her knuckles burn and so do her lungs. 

She tries to claw the skin off of her face, desperate to feel more, more, more. To feel the sadness she is supposed to feel when she hears that they had died. 

All she feels is blinding rage because they have never picked her up. And that now they won’t ever do that.

Her hands shake and she marvels at her left hand: a balled up fist, knuckles white and covered in plaster, already starting to bruise. Where she dug her nails into her skin now pool droplets of blood. 

She hates this feeling, it makes her all itchy and nauseated. She hates hate, but more than that she hates being out of control. 

She finds matches in her right jacket pocket. 

She is going to burn this building down. 

The fire brigade comes faster than anticipated. 

They put the fire out before it can eat more than one, maybe two stories at most, of the building. 

No one dies. Okay, maybe three people died. Who cares?

That evening the director tells her “You can’t live here anymore,” and Oksana nods. “Someone will come and pick you up in the morning.”

Oksana does not allow herself to sleep. 

By 4 am she is picked up by a police officer who tells her that she will spend the foreseeable future of her youth in a juvenile detention center, that they will beat the crazy out of her and then she will be normal again. (As if she was ever normal to begin with.) 

This one ends like it begins: an early morning with the sun barely visible on the horizon, an engine roaring up loudly and driving down the street into the far off distance.


	3. 2008 - 2014: The In-Between

> One Art  
>  BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
> 
> The art of losing isn’t hard to master;  
>  so many things seem filled with the intent  
>  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
> 
> Lose something every day. Accept the fluster  
>  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.  
>  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
> 
> Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  
>  places, and names, and where it was you meant  
>  to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
> 
> I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or  
>  next-to-last, of three loved houses went.  
>  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
> 
> I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,  
>  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.  
>  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
> 
> —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture  
>  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident  
>  the art of losing’s not too hard to master  
>  though it may look like ( _Write_ it!) like disaster.

* * *

**a.) 2008 - 2011: Anna**

It is the end of summer 2008, as much as this season can be considered “summer” in Russia, and Oksana, now fifteen years old is released from the Moscow Juvenile Detention Center. She leaves with her duffel bag slung across her back, filled with all her belongings and a bunch of fancy new diagnoses. 

She is driven to an all-girl boarding school, much to her delight, where she is supposed to stay until she graduates. 

This is where she meets Anna Leonova. 

Anna treats her differently. She pays attention to Oksana, and not in the way her mother would have done. Anna sees Oksana for who she is and teaches her how to write and speak English and French and she teaches her poetry and through Anna, Oksana learns what a villanelle is.

It’s ironic that for a period of time she gets obsessed with them. 

Anna invites her to her home after school, once at first and then more and more turns into every day. She cooks for Oksana, and they read poetry to each other and they take pictures together.

The kiss.

They have sex. 

And Oksana starts to like her, more than she’s ever liked a person before. She thinks she might even care for the teacher with the really nice hair.

But then there is Maxi, Anna’s husband. He is always in the way, always coming home entirely too early, always scowling when Oksana is there as well, especially if she sits in his favorite spot. And Anna always goes back to him, always chooses him over her, even if she writes Anna well-crafted letters. 

Especially when she writes Anna well-crafted letters.

And then in 2011, when Anna chooses Maxi over her again, she can’t take, isn’t willing to take it any longer. So Oksana acts on her impulses and takes the sharpest knife she can find in Anna’s kitchen. She walks into their bedroom, pins Maxi to the bed and cuts his penis clean off.

It doesn’t take long for him to bleed dry and Oksana stands, bloody knife in one and the penis in the other hand, grinning maniacally at a screaming Anna.

“Now you will love me more,” Oksana had said and Anna shut up for a second before screaming even louder and disappearing into the living room.

Oksana opens her hands and lets everything drop and follows her. She doesn’t understand. Anna always told her that if it wasn’t for her husband she would only have eyes for Oksana. She should be happy but instead she is screaming. Now it will only be them two, no distractions. And she is screaming. For a second it makes Oksana nervous, anxiety rising but she pushes it down quickly. 

She is a thing, not a person. Plastic can’t feel. 

_In retrospect, with Eve in the picture, Villanelle understands how wrong and rotten everything about their relationship had been from the beginning:_

_Where Villanelle thought she had the control over the situation, she now sees that it's always been Anna who guided their relationship. Anna, who invited her over to her house to give her extra lessons. Anna, who kissed her first and felt her up first. Anna, that kept pictures of Oksana and all the letters. Anna, who had the power._

Anna calls the police.

They arrest Oksana. She doesn’t resist.

Oksana decides people can’t be homes.

**b. 2011 - 2014: Prison**

Oksana enjoys prison. There is something about the routine that calms her mind. The waking up at the same time, the breakfast, the labor, the showering, the copious amounts of sex in the evening and between activities, Oksana likes the last part about her routine the most. 

She indulges in the sex, and the touching, and the groping. In the roughness. She revels in the control she has over the women, the hunt, the seduction, making them come over and over and over again until they forget who they are and where they are and what their name is and the cold of the Russian nights. 

When the guards make advances at Oksana however, she grins at them like a Cheshire Cat, eyes manic like a wild cat ready to pounce. She tells them that the reason she is in prison is because she’s cut a guy’s dick off and if they don’t stop touching her right now, the same will happen to them. Some of them don’t abide the warning.

But most of the time they back off, everyone backs off. All the men fear Oksana. 

Oksana basks in it like a cat basks in the sunshine of a summers day. 

The guards start calling her a monster and it takes quickly, like fire to a run down orphanage until everyone calls her by “monster” instead of her name. 

The monster gets into fights, lets her rage take over her mind and punches and punches and punches and gets thrown into solitary confinement a lot. She almost chokes a guard to death. She is the monster in every sense of the word. 

Until she dies, she considers herself a monster as well. With bruises all over her body, slowly fading scars, and freshly bleeding wounds. She doesn’t know it yet, but everyone will consider her a monster until she is twenty-four years old and meets ex-agent Eve Polastri.

On August 20th 2014, Oksana Anatoljevna Astankova is declared dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was particularly struggling to write this chapter and maybe I’ll come back to this one when the whole thing is finished and maybe not it’s just what it is for now, I hope you’ll still be able to enjoy x


	4. 2017 - 2020: Cities

Between dying, but not really, and moving to Paris Oksana doesn’t have a home. She was broken out of prison and recruited by an organization, The Twelve, that offered her more money than she had ever seen in her lifetime. And in return she was turned into a cold-hearted killing machine.

That’s about all the positive aspects there are to her new job.

Her mental list of negative things contains just as many points:

Dasha. 

Oksana hates Dasha and Dasha isn’t too keen on having to train Oksana either. She strips the girl of her humanity, tells her that she isn’t worth anything but the quality of her murders. Tells her that Oksana has to be the perfect killing machine if she wants to keep the money and if wants to rise in the ranks. Dasha reminds Oksana of her mother, in a way. She reminds her of home so maybe Dasha is home, no? Except that Oksana decided that people can’t be home. Instead she decides to hate Dasha with every fiber of her being.

* * *

She finds it hard to explain why Paris, of all cities, feels like home to her the most. Living there comes to her as easy as killing. 

The city, in a way, lets her breathe and exist and isn’t bothered by her ostentation and curiosity and ferocious hunger. On the contrary. It indulges her in it. Encourages her to take more for herself. Always more, more, the most. 

Paris _is_ indulgence. It is overconsumption. It is oversaturation, almost but never quite. 

And everywhere she goes, she hears Anna speak and it’s like she’s never lost their connection in the first place. The city is thumping with people, and poetry, and Anna, and the feeling of being wanted, and Anna, and kissing, and touching, fingers hungrily roaming over naked skin, and sex. 

And Anna, Anna, Anna.

A beating heart of memories. And here her blood is the city’s blood is Anna’s blood. 

She stops speaking Russian in fear of forgetting what her and Anna had.

Here, she belongs and she never quite felt like she belonged anywhere before. She stepped off of the train, set foot on French land for the first time and the city made itself home in her heart. 

Maybe Paris isn’t her home, but Paris’ home is her. 

Time in the capital moves slower than she is used to, always a quarter beat behind. It is viscose like heavy honey dripping from pink lips, sickly saccharine and entirely its own creation. Paris takes its sweet time to wake up, stretches its limbs carefully like a waking cat in a kitchen windowsill. It basks in the warmth of the sun and takes it all in before finally allowing itself to move. Paris is a tourist in its own city, looks at itself through eyes that have never seen its grandeur before. It gauges at itself and its beauty and takes pictures of every minor thing.

Paris, like her, is old and new, merged together. Becoming one entity with separate histories.

There is always a “before” and an “after” in her life: before Anna, after Anna; before prison, after prison; before Oksana, after Oksana; before being a thing, and then being nothing but a thing. 

She gives being a thing rather than being a person a name: Villanelle. 

Villanelle wears clothes that Oksana could never afford, wears it like armor to shield herself from others and shield others from seeing the real her. It is protection of the most distracting kind. Villanelle wears flamboyance like a second skin. She dresses to kill. Literally. 

Villanelle takes up space where Oksana would have made herself as invisible as possible. Villanelle wears colors that scream for attention where Oksana would’ve worn nothing but black and white and muted colors, like herself. 

_Villanelle_ is overindulgence. Villanelle buries Oksana in the depths of her own self. Villanelle is not a happy person but she can pretend because she is everything that Oksana could never be. 

Villanelle is survival.

And Villanelle, just like Paris, is reinvention. 

Villanelle is after Oksana, between versions of Oksanas, before Oksana. Villanelle is after Anna. 

But then somewhere between Anna, dying, and moving on she meets Eve Polastri. 

Meets her in a dingy, terribly lit bathroom somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere-London. Villanelle doesn’t recall when it happens but Anna morphs into Eve and survival morphs into being alive. 

French fades in favor of English. 

And then she is huntress and the hunted. She is feast and famine, starving without Eve’s attention. She is snake and apple. And in their game of absolution, she is God, administering everything. For a while, Villanelle is all-knowing and Eve is nothing but a pawn on the chessboard of her creation. To be used and discarded like herself. An infatuation before the next best thing crosses her path.

If Eve was a city, she would be the embodiment of London.

Eve, for Villanelle, _is_ London. A city with no light. Always dark and grey and gloomy. Monochrome concrete jungle. The skies are always covered in a wall of rain clouds, never blue. London is rainy and rude and unwelcoming. A city made of walls that have their eyes everywhere. London is uncaring for the most part, passive but observant. The thought of London makes Villanelle sick in the same way that roller coasters do. London is light pollution, bright and never asleep, always searching for absolution in undiscovered spaces, in questions that have no absolution. London is not being able to see three meters ahead, not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Eve, like London, tries to keep its facade up. To keep the unwavering image of tradition and perfection intact. 

Eve is orderly, like the street structure, with walls of concrete and glass and metal. With no way to look inside while Eve sees everything that’s going on around her. Observing but not partaking. London is distance, a city that keeps to itself and doesn’t share. London is overcrowded, always right on your heels.

Eve is efficient like the public transport system. No diversions and getting from point a to b without the hassle. Her mind is crowded with unwelcome thoughts and smells and visitors. 

In the end, Eve sees herself as alone, an unrecognizable face in the ever changing crowd. Villanelle knows because she knows they’re the same.

London moves fast, is always three steps ahead of you, pushes you into the train cart before the doors fully open. 

London is lemon tea forgotten on the counter, cold and bitter and sour. 

London is messy in ways that can only be discovered when you stare at it long and hard until it caves and crumbles under the weight of your gaze.

But London could be watching movies. London could be normal. 

London, in many ways, might be more similar to Paris than London wants to admit. But they’re not there yet. 

And after Paris, and London, and Rome, before Russia and running away, comes Barcelona. 

Barcelona is nothing more than a distraction. Barcelona is sunny and loud but private. Barcelona has clothes, and a wife. Barcelona is loneliness. Barcelona is after shooting your soulmate dead because you were angry and acting on impulse. Barcelona is before finding out that your soulmate survived. Barcelona is regret.

Barcelona is nothing but a temporary island that keeps her from drowning. All Villanelle is waiting for is a ship to sail by and welcome her on board. 

Barcelona is nothing but a filler chapter to bridge the time. It is unimportant. 

Barcelona is before everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I uploaded the wrong version which :)) fun I hope you enjoyed it !


	5. 2020: Russia 2.0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Russia, again

When she steps off the train in The Middle Of Nowhere, Russia, she immediately feels the uneasiness creeping through the cracks of her facade. Where a second ago, Villanelle thought of this as a good idea, now starts regret settling in. She tugs at her turtleneck, an echo of Eve she carries with her, gulps, and starts moving. 

The decision to walk to the address that was given to her, is taken off her hands when Villanelle realizes that she has no other choice. Sighing, she puts the headphones back over her head and presses play. 

The house and the barn are not the ones from her childhood, not even in the same town and she wonders what drove her brother to move here. Before Villanelle makes her way to the front door, she spies the surroundings like a lioness on the hunt, or like a stray cat looking for a way back inside the house. Cautious because it remembered the first time the people in that home had hurt her. 

She finds a patch of vegetable garden behind the house, the only part that looks like it’s been cared for. She takes a look into the barn and sees that it must be used as a workshop. Everything is dry and different shades of beige and brown and it’s so boring. Villanelle wants to leave but instead she finally goes to the front door, wooden and chipped, barely blue anymore. 

When she enters, she is greeted by the sounds of the television playing loudly in the adjacent room, by people arguing in a language she no longer wants to know, by a coldness that is not necessarily the temperature. 

She stands in front of a wall of pictures. 

Villanelle looks at them, really looks at them, takes them in detail by detail, and frowns. Her mother is in every single one of them, her hair not as shitty as Villanelle remembers it to be, and she is sure that that is her mother but who— who is that other man next to her? 

That is not her father. 

She searches every frame all over again but she can’t find pictures of her father anywhere on there.

She will have to ask Pyotr about it. 

She wonders how her mother died. If it was painful and long or easy and quick. 

If it was up to Oksana, she would make it easy and quick. She was her mother after all. 

Villanelle wanders through the kitchen, picks everything up and inspects it long and hard. The dishware, the sugar, the cutlery, the red yarn. 

Everything seems so— so normal. 

Villanelle almost yearns to be part of it, of this normalcy. She almost yearns for the things she never had. A childhood, home cooked meals, love and safety. 

Villanelle sits down at the kitchen table, willing to wait for her brother, Pyotr, to step inside and then see her. 

Instead of Pyotr she is met by a younger boy, older than ten but younger than fourteen, who asks her who she is. He introduces himself as Bor’ka. When she tells him that she speaks “only” English, he speaks English with her, goes on and on about Elton John and his music. He seems sweet and young and naïve and Villanelle thinks she could’ve been that if she was given the opportunity.

They both have their mother’s eyes. 

He's not afraid of her. 

Villanelle instantly takes a liking to her half brother. 

Then, other people enter from the living room. 

The first guy looks like he has nothing to do but to sit around all day and drink beer. He looks like he hasn’t showered in days. 

His girlfriend looks quite Russian, Oksana determines, clothing, platinum blonde hair, butchered botox-jobs and all. 

They are the voices from the living room and Villanelle thinks they make quite the pair. 

Then an older man enters. They fight about renting out rooms and sleeping around and—

And then there’s Pyotr. He looks dirty, like he just returned from work. His hair has outgrown its haircut and it’s brown and he has the same eyes as her and Bor’ka. 

For a brief second, Oksana rememberers her happy childhood memories with her father. He looks just like him. 

“Oksana,” he gasps. And in his arms, for a minute, she feels welcomed home. 

Then Bor‘ka takes her hand and leads her to his room. He shows her his red star-sunglasses and his Elton John wig and she puts it on. It feels different to how it usually feels. The rush of adrenaline with dressing up to kill doesn’t come, instead all she wants is for her brother to like her. They talk about traveling and food. He marvels at her and how she’s been everywhere and has eaten so many traditional dishes. 

Villanelle likes how he is interested in food, a thing they have in common. She could talk about it for days. 

She finds she genuinely wants to get to know Bor’ka. 

Hushed voices reach Villanelle’s ears and she gets up to sneak a look out of the dorr and around the corner into the living room. Pyotr is talking to his step-father and his step-brother. 

“She died in a fire, no?” She tries to ignore it. It doesn’t matter, she is here now.

“Obviously not,” Pyotr retorts. Villanelle grins and retreats back into Bor’ka’s room. They continue talking about food and travel. And food.

And then everything changes. Villanelle hears the motor of a car cutting off and she instantly _knows_.

”No no no no no no!” Her mind skips like a record. She isn’t dead and Oksana isn’t safe here and she has to get out. She rips the wig off her head and pulls the sunglasses down. 

“She is coming home from grocery shopping,” Bor’ka tries to explain.

Oksana feels the panic creeping up her throat. She feels the ants crawling under skin, tiny and prickly and she gets nauseous immediately. Everything burns and a shiver is running down her spine. Her heart starts beating faster and faster and she grabs at her hair to ground herself and her thoughts. There are so many of them that she can’t focus on one but none of them are calming and all of them are screaming at her to get away now. To run and never return. All of them are about how she’s not dead and Villanelle needs to get Oksana out of here as quick as possible. About how Villanelle needs to protect herself and _run_. 

She makes her way to the front door but turns around immediately as she hears footsteps approaching and hurries to the back door. She yanks the handle, pulls on it but it won’t budge. It’s locked. And tears are burning at her eyes but she won’t give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

Oksana can’t breathe, feels like she felt on her ninth birthday. She decides that the front door is her only way out. She can feel the blood rushing in her ears and everything gets hot and sticky. And then her vision tunnels and the front door— Run! Get away, she’s not dead. You’re not safe.

As she stops in her tracks, in the middle of the living room, everything around her stops moving as well. There are no sounds when Oksana locks eyes with her mother, looking at each other with an expression that screams _I can’t believe you’re not dead_ and Villanelle can see the shift in her mother’s eyes, the decision to play along. 

“Oksana!” Groceries fall to the floor as the older woman hurries over. She’s not dead. Neither of them are. Oksana wishes that the woman touching her was.

Her mother’s body is as sharp as ever but Villanelle tries to ignore it as she’s standing, frozen, embraced by her mother for the first time. Slowly, everything starts moving again and Oksana takes a breath.

“This is home,” Oksana reassures herself. It’s home because this is exactly what it felt like the first time around. 

She doesn’t expect it but Oksana has fun. She talks a lot to her brothers and they have game nights where they play cards and sing and dance to Elton John. 

There is a fun fair and she wins at all the games. Pyotr is proud of her and tells everyone who listens (and who doesn’t listen) that they are siblings. She observes Bor’ka at a baking contest and even though he doesn’t win she finds she is proud of him nevertheless. She finds she can let loose and before she knows her guards are down. 

And then her little brother tells her that their mother hasn’t changed and suddenly her anger is rising again. She doesn’t want the same life for him. He deserves a life where he is told how much he is loved and how proud people are of him. 

And to make matters worse, her step brother and his weird girlfriend believe in all the conspiracy theories. It’s ridiculous but that is a warning sign she takes serious. 

In retrospect she should’ve expected what came next. 

She just wanted to relive a fun memory from her own childhood. So, she dresses up in a cute dress and waits in the kitchen, holding a knife in her hand, with tomato paste smeared under her eyes for blood. When her mother enters, all she says is “You’re wasting food.”

Her mother only ever saw the bad in her. She only ever saw how much she was worth to her in that moment and the future and right then it was two streaks of drying tomato paste on her cheeks. 

“Clean yourself up.”

“Can you do it?”

“You’re not a child.”

“I want to feel like one.”

When her mother takes the wash cloth from her hands and starts removing the red paste from Oksana’s face, it’s soft. It’s careful and sweet and Oksana wants to cry because this is what she missed out on. This is what she could’ve had. 

Then, the softness starts squeezing at her cheeks.  
“You have to leave. You don’t belong here. This is not your family.”

Villanelle is told that it’s her darkness that consumes her father and it’s solely her fault that he had died. That her mother’s life was ruined by a child’s hand. 

And Villanelle wants to say that she was only a child. She didn’t understand what her mother meant back then and she didn’t mean to behave like this. She just wanted to be loved. She didn’t know better. And that she is sorry. 

No. She is not sorry for being herself. She is only sorry that she wasn’t loved and helped. 

She wants to say that the darkness her mother sees in her is born from herself. That it’s her who destroyed the family. That she is the root. She is her mother’s daughter. She’s always known that the “darkness” stems from her and made her what she is. 

She kneels in front of her mother, who looks at her with a familiar emptiness in her eyes. 

“I think I have to kill you, Mama.”

* * *

When she looks back she sees Bor’ka running to the barn and the house explode. Oksana screams until her throat is raw. 

Russia ends with Villanelle on the train.

She puts the headphones over her ears and turns the volume up to the max, an attempt at drowning out her loud mind. 

It is screaming so loud and messy and cluttered and everything is blurry inside her head. There are so many thoughts racing through her head, all at once and they’re like one big mass, yet she is able to decipher each thought individually. Everything around her sounds like static, it sounds like everything looks through her tear filled eyes. Maybe her ears are just stuffed with cotton. She can barely control the shaking of her arm, and her legs, and everything feels so numb. Everything feels like nothing. And yet it’s borderline too much. 

And then the panic settles in because she can’t stop moving, she can’t stop, she can’t— when she stops she will cry and she can’t cry right now. Or ever. And her left hand is clawing at her right arm just willing to control something. But her arm feels numb. Like she knows it’s part of her body but it feels so detached from the rest, a limb with its own mind and Villanelle hates being out of control like this. 

She is sure that under that denim jumpsuit her arm is raw and red but if she lets go, it will come crashing like a wave and she is not ready to drown right now.

She feels like she is nine again, or twelve. 

At least she manages to hold her tears at bay. They burn in her eyes but she won’t allow it. Can’t allow it.

Villanelle knows that to the passenger sitting opposite her, she must seem like a headcase. And honestly? She feels like one as well. Not that she cares. Not that anyone cares. Not that anyone ever cared. She’s always been alone and always will be alone.

Her right hand seizes up, starts hurting and Villanelle bites her lip as memories come flooding in. 

_You’re not a child._

_I want to feel like one._

_You don’t belong here._

_I think I have to kill you, Mama._

And then suddenly, without any kind of advance warning, she feels like she is drowning again and the thoughts overpower _Crocodile Rock_ and everything’s too much. 

It’s always been nothing and boredom so every fragment of emotion is too much. But this, Villanelle decides, is next level scary and overwhelming. 

The passenger opposite her gets up and moves seats. 

_“Well, Crocodile Rocking is something shocking  
When your feet just can't keep still,”_ the song starts playing again. 

And Villanelle can’t help herself but focus on her leg that doesn’t stop shaking. It’s not in her control, has a mind if its own and not being in control leads to spiraling more. She gasps for air. Why can’t she control her body? Instead, her leg starts shaking more. 

Oksana opens Spotify and searches for a different playlist that doesn’t remind her of what could have been and lands on death metal. Villanelle hates it but the harshness of it all manages to drown out everything around her until it turns into background noise. She feels like she can breathe again. 

The rest of the train ride passes in a blur. 

Villanelle has nowhere to go, has nowhere to call home anymore. 

When she arrives in Moscow, she books the next flight to London because maybe, just maybe, _she_ will let her stay.


	6. 2020: Eve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> they meet

Merriam-Webster defines chaos as follows:

_Chaos (n): the inherent unpredictability in the behaviour of a complex natural system_

Everywhere Villanelle goes she leaves a trail of chaos, Eve thinks to herself. Whenever Eve is convinced that she finally has Villanelle figured out, the assassin acts in such an unpredictable manner that Eve feels like she is forced to start back at zero. 

Game over. 

Return to home screen. 

Press start to begin. 

The blonde is the embodiment of chaos. That’s just her nature.

* * *

After Poland, Eve returns to her studio apartment, with plans to get drunk beyond comprehension and pass out for the next three days. She just wants to sleep in a bed, a normal sized one at that because she deserves it after the journey she’s had. 

Niko is dead. 

She kind of made peace with it on her flight back to London. He is dead, and she realizes that she didn’t care much about him anyway. 

And internally, Eve knows, she just _knows_ , that it wasn’t Villanelle who rammed a pitchfork through Niko’s neck. And yet a tiny part of her still clings onto that belief, in fear of what all of it would mean otherwise.

It’s almost midnight when Eve arrives in London, and it takes hours to get to her apartment on the other side of the city. When she finally enters through her front door, she is greeted by the faint smell of gasoline and _her_. Eve shakes her head, anger quickly rising in her chest, mixed with excitement.

No. She can't get excited by the prospect of her invading her private space time and time again. She pushes that feeling down in favor of the anger bubbling up even stronger.

Eve clenches her right hand into a fist, it shakes, her bags hit the ground. She needs wine.

She needs to get Poland off of her first.

Her feet stop dead in the doorframe of the bathroom. Here, it smells strongly of gasoline and smoke. Someone, not someone, her, she is laying in the bathtub. Eve’s bathtub in Eve’s flat in London. 

She observes Villanelle, and Villanelle doesn’t move and for a brief second Eve wonders what happened to her. Her hair is tied in a bun, messy with strands of hair hanging loose on the sides of her head.

It’s ridiculous, Eve thinks then, that she wonders what happened to the sociopathic assassin that is in her bathtub, instead of asking herself about why she is here or running for her life. Instead, Eve moves closer, doesn’t turn on the lights, and reaches out for Villanelle’s neck, searching for a pulse.

When she finds it beating strong, Eve is relieved. 

She should run. 

Run for her life, far away, to safety.

Her instinct tells her that there is no need for running.

That she is safe. 

“Villanelle,” Eve’s voice booms in the silent emptiness, echoes on the tiled wall. And the assassin’s eyes snap open, one hand grabs Eve’s wrist and yanks it away from her neck.

Villanelle smiles but even in the dark Eve can see that it is misplaced on Villanelle’s face. “Hi, Eve.” In the dark, her voice sounds defeated, exhausted even.

She doesn’t know why but the first thing Eve asks is “Why do you reek of gasoline?”

Villanelle doesn’t answer the question. She averts her gaze, her smile faltering for a second before she shakes herself out of it. It’s then that it hits Eve.

“What happened?” Her voice is laced with worry as she observes Villanelle’s eyes fill with tears.

“You always ask so many questions, Eve, always so nosy,” Villanelle replies and Eve frowns. Why does she ask so many questions. Eve rolls her eyes at herself. She decides to take a different route.

“What do you need?” It’s spoken more softly than before. She just wants Villanelle to know that she can trust her. There is a long silence between them, it hangs heavy in the darkness but Eve waits patiently. When the answer comes it’s more timid than she expected. 

“Can you wash my hair?” Villanelle’s voice breaks at the end but Eve brushes over it.

“Of course,” she replies. She sees Villanelle’s shoulders relax. “Do you want something to eat while I let the bath run?” The blonde shakes her head. Eve thinks that now at the latest, she’d known something is wrong. Villanelle never refused something to eat.

“Okay. You do have to get out of the bathtub though so I can run it,” Eve adds as an afterthought. “I’ll be right back.”

She doesn’t know why she tells Villanelle that she will be right back or why she is helping her but her instincts tell her that it is the right thing to do. And her instincts are rarely wrong when it concerns the assassin. She leaves the bathroom to look through her closet for something that Villanelle can wear. Eventually, Eve lands on a gray oversized shirt and some shorts she hopes will fit the assassin.

As she returns, she turns on the lights in the bathroom. Villanelle is still laying in the bathtub, flinching momentarily.

“C’mon, V,” Eve says as she approaches. “Get up. The sooner you do that the sooner the bathtub is filled and — Hey, hey why are crying?”

Now with the added lights and Eve kneeling right in front of the bathtub, right in front of her, she can not only see that Villanelle is crying, but that her hair looks unwashed, that her face is covered in dust and sweat and grease and that the denim overall she is wearing is not what she was expecting. Her whole appearance is entirely unexpected to Eve.

“Make it stop, Eve, please. Make it stop!” Villanelle pleads and Eve is unsure how to react.

“Make what stop?” She asks cautiously.

“Every— Everything. It’s too much. It’s— I can’t.” 

As much as she can Eve wraps her arms around Villanelle. They only stay like this for a moment before Eve speaks again: “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

* * *

“I need to get out. I can’t do this anymore,” Villanelle declares as they sit in the kitchen. Her hair not yet dry, dressed in the clothes that Eve handed her. “It’s— it’s too much after— I just don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Okay.”

Eve doesn’t know what to say, so she settles for that. As an afterthought she adds: “We’ll figure it out.”

They sit at the kitchen table, both with mugs of steaming tea in their hands. It’s quiet but comfortable between them. It gives both of them room to think and Eve realizes that she isn’t scared, isn’t angry, isn’t furious anymore. 

She finds she genuinely wants to help Villanelle. Whatever happened between their last meeting and now, it changed the assassin completely. 

Eve wants to know what happened so she asks as much. 

”What are you doing here, Villanelle?”

Villanelle shakes her head. 

Eve doesn’t get an answer to that question either. It’s been a night of unanswered questions and unexpected emotions and outbursts so far.

“You don’t want to talk about it?” Villanelle nods. Eve sighs. “Alright. Okay.”

Then, after a beat, she adds: “Villanelle?” But the blondes eyes are glazed over and Eve knows that she is lost deep in her own mind.

“Are you okay?”

* * *

Villanelle doesn’t want to tell Eve, doesn’t want Eve to ask her if she’s okay. She knows that these are the words that will leave Eve’s mouth next.

“Are you okay?” She asks. Villanelle can't bring herself to look up, the feeling in her throat already constricting her airways. She brings her hand up to it subconsciously, scratching at the skin there, then clawing. 

Air. She needs air. 

Eve asks her another question, Villanelle thinks, but she can't focus on that right now. Her mother’s passive face floods her mind, and her voice is there again and suddenly she isn’t Villanelle anymore. 

She can’t breathe. 

She is Oksana. 

Air. She needs air. 

She is darkness that never cries. She is unloved. She is just a child. 

She can’t breathe. 

The darkness takes her, not the other way around. It never is the other way around.

* * *

Eve regrets asking the instant the words left her mouth. She wants to know because there is something so obviously wrong with Villanelle. But not like this. If it makes Villanelle behave like a wild animal trapped in a cage she won’t ever ask her again. 

She observes, almost helpless, as Villanelle’s eyes glaze over and her hands wander to her throat. She touches the skin there like she is looking for another pair of hands. Then she starts scratching at the skin, then clawing at it desperately. 

It’s only then that Eve realizes that Villanelle struggles to breathe and that her whole body shakes with suppressed sobs and Eve snaps out of her daze. She hurriedly crosses the space between them and carefully takes Villanelle’s, not Villanelle’s, Oksana’s hands in her own and holds them firmly against her chest. 

Eve pulls her to her feet carefully and leads the panicking woman to the floor in front of her bed and gently guides them down. She feels like kitchens were always rooms of conflict for them both but this almost seemed like a neutral zone. 

She holds the shaking body against her, as close as possible and she starts to apologize. She can’t help but wonder still what had happened to Villanelle between the bus and now. 

_What happened, Villanelle, what happened to you?_

* * *

It’s always been about control. 

Control over your decisions, your life, your destiny. It’s order on a small scale, that you’d strive to achieve, which always leads to chaos on a bigger scale. 

One job led to an Asian woman with amazing hair, to a tiresome game of cat-and-mouse, then cat-and-cat, to disgusting shepherd’s pie, to Paris, to the Moustache, to the warehouse, to Rome, to Barcelona, to dead, to alive, to the bus and the cake and her. Always her. 

Wanting to know about your past and the why had lead to burning down everything and almost everyone in the process, had lead you here. To her. 

One error amasses into bigger and bigger errors until the system crashes. Yet, she was always a predictable outcome. 

You need air.

* * *

The first thing she feels, as she gets aware of her surroundings again, is the warmth. The kitchen chair was wooden and cold and this, now, feels cozy and warm. Mostly. 

Then, the ringing in her ears gets painfully loud. She winces and then winces because she showed weakness. The ringing is high pitched and disorienting. It makes her dizzy and nauseated. 

She gasps then, finally being able to breathe again. She inhales deeply. 

Her face feels hot and her skin is tight and it burns with dried tears. 

Someone, Eve, kisses the crown of her hair. A wave of fresh tears are running down her face and Eve’s arms pull her impossibly closer. When the ringing in her ears subsides, Oksana, Villanelle, registers what Eve is whispering. 

_I am here. It’s okay. You’re safe. I’m sorry for asking. It’s okay. I got you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

Apologies, like prayers pressed to her temple.

No one had ever apologized to her _and_ meant it. No one had apologized to her for the sake of apologizing before.

“You’re safe. I’m sorry. I got you.”

Each of them an _I love you_ in her own words and gestures. 

Where a black hole should be, as she’s been told countless times before, black and dark and swallowing her and everything around her, sits a heart. Young and beating. Red, and blood, and flesh. Unapologetically keeping her alive. 

Where there’s supposed to be nothing, sits an ever expanding galaxy that gravitates and centers around Eve. It beats _Eve, Eve, Eve_ , a life force that knocks the wind out of her lungs. 

“I killed my mother.” It slips out without consent and Oksana screws her eyes shut. She should trust Eve but she knows that now Eve will let go of her shoulders now and it will become cold instantly and she will be alone all over and forever again. Eve will ask her to leave and never return. She won’t look her in the eyes, will go into the kitchen and busy herself with making tea while waiting for the door to fall into its lock before lifting her head and—

She feels the body beside her shift and she is being pulled carefully, and then she is sitting on Eve’s lap, overwhelmingly close and Eve’s hands move to Villanelle’s face and linger there, thumbs swiping the stray tears from her cheeks. They are warm, comforting, safe. Oksana wants to lean into them, but she resists. 

She is waiting for it. It never happens.

“Do you think I’m a monster?”

Eve doesn’t have to think about that. “You are _so many_ things.”

Eve’s dark eyes look into hers, searching for something, and Villanelle feels seen. Eve is looking into her, not through her. The unspoken words hang between them, suspended in the air. So close yet entirely out of reach. 

Breathing becomes difficult again. 

Her left hand sneaks to her throat again but they are intercepted by Eve’s hand wrapping around her wrist. 

“How did it make _you_ feel?”

Oksana and Villanelle sob and Eve’s arms pull her close, close, closer until they are pressed chest to chest and Eve holds her. They feel safe in Eve’s embrace.

Villanelle, Eve, and Oksana, they are the same. Eve’s eyes are Villanelle’s eyes and Villanelle’s hands are Eve’s hands and when they touch each other they are no longer afraid. Eve’s touch brings Villanelle back to safe land. She, no longer drowning in the swallowing storm of unknown emotions. Eve is anchor, pulling her from ice cold past. Without her, Villanelle is less. Less and less until she is nothing. 

Before Eve, Oksana’s world was black and white. Monochrom and mute. And then Eve stumbled into her life, unknowingly so. With her hands cupping a secret between them, like a child eager to show you the bird they have caught. And then she opened her palms and handed her color. Yellow and orange and red and blue and lilacs, the colors of the sunsets and the golden hues of sunrises. It makes Villanelle’s eyes dance with tears. _Take my heart for it’s all yours now._ Villanelle has never been the same. 

And maybe Villanelle, Oksana, doesn’t quite understand what love is but it’s because she never learnt that love could be this gentle and soft, featherlight fingertips wiping at her cheeks where they coax tears out of her eyes. They are happiness. They are grief. They are her own. She is a person that cries. A person that is overwhelmed by the realization that someone wants her. Wants her to exist as herself. Does not want to change her, all of her. Wants to _love_ her. Oksana. Villanelle. Both. And neither. She never knew that it could be sitting on the floor leaning against a bed and being held by another person. The love she got to know was shards of glass burying into her skin, was harsh, was hands to throat, knife to abdomen and words tearing her apart like guns that rip bullet wounds through shoulders. She was taught that love is transactional. And something entirely disposable. Up to the question posed by Eve ( _How did that make you feel?_ It replays in her mind constantly), love always meant getting far away from Villanelle, or using Oksana for their own benefit. It meant calling her a monster, an agent of chaos, a forest fire that brings everything down with it. 

Oksana, Villanelle, isn’t an it. She is human. She is her own person. She is _hers_. She is old and new. Parts of her old self but reinvented, woken from slumber. Like Paris, she was hidden in herself, a person constructed of back alleys leading nowhere. She used to wander the streets of her own mind, constantly running from herself and her past, always getting lost. Somewhere along the way she couldn’t find herself anymore, too well hidden in the shadows. But then, with killing her mother, she burnt the carefully crafted city of her mind down as well, and emerged from the flames. The new old. Risen like a phoenix. She was a ravishing forest fire after all.

Her mind is all over the place.

“It didn’t feel like it was supposed to feel. I wanted to be free but it broke me instead. I wanted to do what she had done to me. And I wanted to give her a chance but she said I didn’t belong— that it wasn’t my family and I think she never viewed me as part of the family. She just dropped me off that day and I knew that something was wrong but I was scared, Eve. When I turned around she was gone. She was gone, Eve, just like that— and the sun was only just rising and, and they kept _him_. They kept him but not me and, and— Make it stop, Eve. Please. It hurts,” Oksana is gasping for air while clawing at her chest with her nails that leave red scratch marks all over. She starts hitting herself in the head with the ball of her palm of the other hand and she can’t breathe. “Make it stop, make it stop, Eve, please, I—“

Eve grabs Oksana’s wrists and pulls them to herself. “Stop it,” her voice says softly. Eve’s thumb swipes over her palm and then leans forward to leave a kiss where Oksana hit herself and the world stops in its tracks. 

Everything feels like they’re suspended in amber, and Oksana wants to keep this moment forever. It feels so vastly different to when her mother did all these things. 

Eve is careful and tender where her mother gripped her with full force, touched her with regard to herself only, where Eve searches in Villanelle’s eyes and asks for consent to infringe on her personal space. 

It makes tears sting in her eyes, so Villanelle closes them and she swallows the sobs threatening to escape. 

“‘Ksana,” Eve’s voice is laced with compassion. “Look at me, babe.” 

Villanelle opens her eyes and is met with Eve’s. 

“You were just a child,” she says. ”You probably didn’t understand yourself what was going on with you, really, when everyone told you you’re bad and terrible and all these things and nobody helped you. You did not deserve any of that. It’s okay, ‘Ksana. You were just a child. It’s okay. She can’t hurt you anymore. It’s okay.” 

Eve pulls Villanelle into a hug and they stay like this for a moment. She gives the younger woman time to process her words, holds her in silence, presses a kiss to her temple and then Villanelle breaks. 

She sobs because Eve is here and Eve understands. 

There are no words for her to explain how it makes her feel because Eve understands. And Eve is here and Eve is Eve and holds her and she is safe. And sometimes things don’t feel like other things. 

And Eve feels like safety. 

Eve feels like home. 

Eve is home. 

The sun is just starting to rise when they finally fall asleep, curled up in bed, holding on tight to each other.

They are home.

(Because maybe people can be home after all.)


	7. 2020 - : The Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> just an epilogue kinda thing

“Where are we going from here?” Eve asks Oksana.

They stop walking and Oksana lets go of Eve’s hand and pulls out a map from her purse. She points to a spot, declaring that that is their location and then trails her finger from there to their destination. 

“We aren’t far.” She grins at Eve who smiles back at her. 

As Oksana looks around and takes it all in - the white sand of the beach, the sun setting, the palm trees - her eyes land back on Eve. 

She leans in and kisses her.

Eve kisses her back, deepens the kiss and then breaks it. “I love you, ‘Ksana, but our reservation is in ten minutes. So, c’mon.”

She takes Oksana’s hand as they start hurrying down the beach to make it to the restaurant in time.

 _It’s crazy,_ Oksana thinks, _that this is only the beginning._

**Author's Note:**

> if you like this please leave kudos and comments 💖
> 
> and if there’s theories you have to later stages in her life or things you want to see hmu @eve-polastri-is-bi on tumblr


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